(Caution: This article will contain spoilers for The Walking Dead by Telltale Games.)

I am a twenty-seven year old male standing in the foyer of the doctor’s office. I have been sick for several weeks, with snot and mucus pouring from every inconvenient slot or hole possible. I had made this doctor’s appointment myself and had made sure it worked with my health insurance.

Yet I stand paralyzed at the entrance, looking at the different desks and the other ill patients sitting in old, rickety chairs. They stare — at the crusty carpet, walls, even at me — with a grief-stricken grimace that looks like how I feel. I stand here and wonder what, for the life of me, I am supposed to do. What was it my parents always did when walking into a doctor’s office? I don’t know. I had always just found a corner and powered on my GameBoy or opened the pages of one of my books.

No one in my family saw it coming, but I have become a victim of the parent characters in Telltale’s The Walking Dead.